Terms of Service

In a perfect world, it would be possible to make this site availble to everyone in the universe, forever and ever, smoothly and error-free; implement any change or upgrade that anyone asks for instantaneously; provide live customer support 24/7/365 in every language; and make everybody happy all of the time.

However, the world is far from perfect - and so ...

My guarantee of service ... or lack thereof ...

To spare you a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo, this is a completely gratuitous service, and as such, it comes without any warranty, use at your own risk, caveat freeloader, etc. On top of that, the site is currently in development, and I'll probably be tinkering with it until doomsday in an attempt to upgrade this or streamline that, and as programming is generally a process of trial and error, trials may fail and errors may occur.

That said, my intention is to keep this site up and running as well and as long as possible. While I don't expect there to be a problem I can't promise you that there won't be a server outage, a programming glitch that eats your data, problems with my ISP that require me to take the site down, financial difficulties that render me unable to keep the site going, or the mental stress of everyday life leads me to completely ditch it and move to Tahiti. Stuff happens.

Refusal of Service

Simply stated, I reserve the right to refuse access to this site to anyone, at any time, at my own sole discretion. I'm generally not the type to ban users without a pretty good reason - but the world is full of idiots, wheedlers, and miscreants, and I don't have the time, resources, or patience to deal with them all - so the only recourse I have is to ban them from the site, or parts if it, for the sake of keeping the service available to the other 99% of users, who are intelligent, honest, and reasonable in their demands and expectations of what is essentially a free ride.

That said, here are some of the issues I've encountered or expect to encounter that lead me to ban users ...

• If you do anything that causes my hosting provider to send me a note about your behavior, you may be banned.
• If you do anything that causes another user or a member of the general public to send me a note about your behavior, especially using this system to send unwanted e-mail of any kind, you may be banned.
• If you do anything that causes me to want to send myself a note about your behavior, especially sending unwanted e-mail of any kind, you may be banned.
• If your user profile contains anything that is obscene or objectionable, your account may be cancelled. If you do this repeatedly, you may be banned.
• If you attempt to poll the service to gather a list of user accounts, you may be banned.
• If you make repeated failed attempts to log into any part of the site, you may be banned.
• If you create multiple accounts from the same IP or e-mail address, I may cancel all but one of those accounts. If it's especially egregious, and obviously not accidental, you may be banned.
• If you repeately pester me about things you could do for yourself, or asking questions that are plainly answered on the site, or generally annoy me to the point that I don't want to deal with you, you may be banned.
• If messages from this site bounce back as rejected from your mail server, your account may be cancelled.

To ban a person, I cancel their account (if they have one), deleting all data, add their e-mail address and/or IP address to a blacklist that prevents them from accessing certain parts of the site. I may even add their IP to a server access file to keep them off the system entirely. I'll also set my e-mail filters to ignore any incoming messages from specific e-mail addresses. Unfortunately, this may affect an entirly innocent person if someone spoofs your e-mail address (or you inherit an e-mail address that was once [ab]used by someone else) or if you share the same ISP and therefore have the same IP address as someone who'd been naughty. Click here for more details.